The Lost Egg

5-6 min read
14 pages

A dinosaur bedtime story: a downpour carries one egg out of the nest, and the big sister rolls it back uphill all afternoon.

At the edge of the valley, in a nest scraped out of the sand and lined with leaves, lay four eggs. Three were pale, almost white, and one was a little darker than the rest, with small speckles at one end. Their mother walked right round the nest several times a day and checked that they were all lying as they should lie: close together, covered with leaves, none of them too near the edge.

They were watched over as well by Mila, the eldest daughter, who had hatched two springs earlier and considered that this made her a very experienced person. Mila knew each egg separately and had quietly given them names, although nobody had asked her to and nobody used the names. The darker one was called Speckle and was her favourite, though of course she would never have admitted it.

One night a downpour came through the valley. It rained so hard that there was no sleeping, and the water ran down the slope in wide streams, carrying away sand, leaves and everything lighter than a stone. In the morning the sky was clear, the air smelt of wet earth, and in the nest there lay three eggs. The edge on the slope side had been washed out, and Speckle was gone.

Their mother stood over the nest and would not leave the other three for a single step, because that is how it has to be and there is no other way: if she went to look for one, she might lose three. Mila stood beside her and saw all of it exactly the same way. She looked at her mother, looked at the slope, then at her mother again, and said: «Then I'll go.»

She went down the wet sliding sand all the way to the bottom of the gully. The water had already dropped and only a narrow trickle was left down the middle, but everywhere there were sticks washed down, pieces of bark and whole heaps of leaves. Mila went slowly, from one bank to the other, and looked under every larger piece of wood, although she was not at all sure what she was actually looking for: a whole egg, or only shell.

Halfway along the gully Mila found a piece of shell and for one dreadful moment thought this was the end of the road. But the shell was thin, greyish and far too small — somebody's bird's nest had probably been lying here for a long time, and the downpour had taken it along with everything else. Mila put it carefully on a stone and went on, only a little faster than before.

She did not find it until the afternoon, much further down than she had expected. It was lying in the fork of a root that stuck out of the bank, whole and untouched, only so plastered with mud that the speckles were almost invisible. Mila sat down beside it and simply looked at it for a good while, because her legs had suddenly gone strangely heavy and did not want to go any further at all.

Then the real problem began. Mila could not take the egg in her mouth — it was too big, and she was afraid of pressing. Nor could she carry it uphill in one foot, because climbing wet sand needed all four of them at once.

So she began to roll it. She pushed with her nose, very slowly, a few finger-widths at a time, choosing the places where the sand was firmer and slid less. When the slope grew too steep she went round it sideways and came back up higher by the longer way, even though that took three times as long.

She rolled it all afternoon. Twice the egg slipped out from under her nose and slid a little way back down, and each time Mila went down after it without a word, set herself up again and started from the same place once more.

The third time, instead of pushing the egg further uphill, Mila sat down and looked at the slope for a good while. Then she chose a different way: not the shortest one, but the one where roots stuck out of the sand along the side. Against every root the egg could be rested while she caught her breath — and from that point on the egg did not slide back even once.

When the sun stood low over the hill she was almost at the nest. Her mother saw her from above and did not move from her place, because somebody had to stay with those three eggs. She said only two words: «Nearly there.»

The last stretch was the worst, because it was the steepest and the most crumbling. Mila propped the egg against her own side so that it could not slide, and pushed it with her shoulder: a step, and another step, and one more — until she felt the dry warm sand of the nest under her feet.

She settled Speckle beside the other three, exactly as it had lain before, raked a few leaves over it, and only then lay down herself. She fell asleep at once. And three weeks later, when a small wet dinosaur hatched out of the darker egg and opened its eyes for the first time, the first thing it saw was Mila — because she was sleeping nearest.

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The Lost Egg

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